The positivistic approach to understanding human action: part one

As mentioned in the previous post, this post will be about positivist approach to understanding human action and eventually why it is inadequate for the purpose. This is quite a long section, because naturalism goes way back, and this will be split into two posts.

Positivism can be thought of as a philosophy of science – one of many different philosophies. This particular philosophy is based on the view that data (or information), which is derived from logical and mathematical reports of sensory experience, is the one and only source of all ‘authoritative knowledge’, and we may only ever come closer to the ‘truth’ by examining scientific knowledge. This type of data, that which has been received from the senses, is known as empirical evidence.

Within folk psychology, human actions are explained by identifying the beliefs and desires that lead to them. It has been stated that “belief and desires ‘bring about action’, ‘result in it’, ‘produce it’, ‘determine it’”. In positivism, scientific explanations must be causal; therefore, any positivistic approach to explanation of human action should attempt to establish a causal connection. These causal connections should be the underlying foundation for when beliefs and actions are accepted as ‘commonsense’ .An example of a positivistic causal law, or a general statement about causality of actions with regard to beliefs and desires, may look something like the following:

[L]: Given a person X, if X wants D, and X believes that A is a means to attain D, under the circumstances, then X does A.

This law-like, positivistic approach, to making a social science out of commonsense, i.e. folk psychology, can be attributed primarily to Max Weber. While Weber did acknowledge the roles that beliefs and desires had in the explanation of human action, he also insisted that the type of explanation they provide must be like those explanations characteristic of the natural sciences.

A statement like [L] would be, in Weber’s view, an ideal type of statement primarily because it is an unrealistic model, like those of natural science which needs to be filled in and refined in its application to individual actions. What it means by the need to fill in and refine a general statement like [L] is the same thing it means that laws must have ‘contingent  relations’. Weber’s demand for a law of human action is based on the view that causation is a matter of laws – things that cannot be changed or altered even if we are unaware of their very existence, things that are just ‘natural’. The crucial point to highlight here is the insistence that if an explanation is to be considered, it must have laws; this is regardless of the question of whether causation is always law governed or not.

As this is quite a complicated section, I need to take a break before I attempt to grapple with the critique and why it is inadequate. This will be done in the next post.